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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

Alison Gopnik

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Alison Gopnik
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: June 16
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
A. Gopnik
A Gopnik
Gopnik
Gopnik A
Gopnik A.
Happens
Teenage
Children
Earlier
Good
Later
Reach
Answer
Deal
Weirdness
Deals
Puberty
Answers
Adulthood

More quotes by Alison Gopnik

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We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.
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It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
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What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
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On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
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Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.
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There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I'm not sure I'd take it.
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Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
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The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
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From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
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Instead of just saying, I love my baby and I pick him up because he's adorable and it's so nice to cuddle with him, we practice attachment parenting. We let our children play outside and have age-appropriate freedoms and are labeled free-range parents.
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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
Alison Gopnik
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Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.
Alison Gopnik
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I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
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Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!
Alison Gopnik
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Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
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Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
Alison Gopnik
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You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.
Alison Gopnik
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We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.
Alison Gopnik